The largest game publisher in the world managed to end April on a high note despite two months of bad press, growing gamer discontent and a half billion dollar lawsuit over the personnel imbroglio surrounding their Modern Warfare games.

The game Bungie makes after Halo: Reach will be huge, on multiple platforms — won't be…
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Apparently, Bungie's deal with Activision, which is for a single new gaming property and all of the games that come out of it, gives them the sort of control almost unheard of in today's world of hundred million dollar games and few self-published titles. Under the agreement, Bungie will still own the franchise, retain independence and even have control over things like the final cost of the game.

Bungie is a game developer that likes to create new universes and then fully explore them.
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"These two things are completely unrelated," Tippl said. "We have been very focused on bringing the best talent to work in our studio model. We have done that successfully over the past two years as can be seen with our merger with Blizzard, bringing Bizarre to join our portfolio and attracting some of the best shooter talent, including some of the Dead Space team. That's been part of our strategy and it's not going to change.

"The Infinity Ward situation is completely different from that. I'm sure you have read our cross complaint and I think it's self-explanatory."

In the complaint, Activision paints a pretty unflattering picture of former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella, both fired by the company for, among other things, "insubordination." According to Activision, the two were trying to make the people at their studio unhappy so they would quit and come to work for the two at a studio that they were secretly setting up behind the publisher's back.

I asked Bungie head Harold Ryan, who was on the same call with Activision's Tpipl, what had changed in the ten years since they had first rejected Activision as a partner.

"I was at Microsoft when Bungie was first acquired," said Ryan. "For Bungie, the thing that was most exciting (about the Microsoft deal) was the opportunity to help define the Xbox and bring the game we wanted to play to a new platform.

"That at the time was the right decision for Bungie."

And now?

"I think this is the opportunity for us to look at where we succeeded over the last ten years and where we didn't do as well as hoped," he said. "This will allow us to really hit millions of players across the world, and do that on the platform of their choice."

Perhaps this is a chance for Bungie to move from helping to define a console to helping to define a medium.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.